Sherban Cantacuzino
Romanian émigré who championed architecture in Britain as well as the buildings of his homeland
SHERBAN CANTACUZINO, who has died aged 89, was an architectural writer and campaigner whose life was dramatically shaped by the political convulsions of his homeland Romania during and after the Second World War. He was, as a Romanian friend wrote, “a prince by birth, a gentleman and architect by education, and an Englishman by mistake”.
The son of the eminent architect and writer George Matei Cantacuzino, he was brought to a Hertfordshire prep school by his mother in September 1939; his father spent the Christmas of that year with them before returning to Bucharest. Sherban was never to see him again. George was imprisoned successively by the fascists and the communists, classified as a “person of unclean origins”, refused permission to join his family, and betrayed and recaptured after a daring attempted escape by sea; he died, aged 61, in 1960.
Cantacuzino’s education, at Winchester and Cambridge, and his career as a writer on architecture, executive editor of the Architectural Review and Secretary of the Royal Fine Art Commission, had the look of a classically English progress through the cultural establishment.
But he was always a man of essentially cosmopolitan outlook, and his most lasting contribution may prove to be Pro Patrimonio, a kind of National Trust for Romania, which he founded in 2000 to save the architectural legacy of a country whose historic buildings had been so severely neglected, both during and after the four decades of Communist rule. It was a return not only to his home, but to the preoccupations of the father from whom he had been so cruelly separated.
As a Cantacuzino, Sherban could claim descent from the 14th-century Byzantine emperor John VI Kantakouzenos; his grandmother was a Bibesco. When, as an old man, he led tours of historic sites for Pro Patrimonio, he was greeted not only as a cultural saviour but as a returning member of an ancient family.
His elegant bearing, aquiline looks and indefatigable charm were princely in the best sense; he was courteous, selflessly generous, with a warm laugh and a memorable speaking voice, its mild English grandeur coloured by a rolled Romanian “r”. He was also tenacious, hard-working, and dedicated to the cause of good design – of all places and periods.
Sherban Cantacuzino was born on September 6 1928, in Paris, the elder child of Prince George Matei Cantacuzino and his wife Sanda, née Stirbey. In his childhood in Romania he spoke French in the home, German to his governess and Romanian with the servants.
He showed an aptitude for the piano at an early age, and gave recitals as a schoolboy; denied permission at the age of 10 to attend the Ring at Bayreuth, he made do with seeing Tristan in Munich, early signs of a lifelong passion for Wagner that was balanced by a love of chamber music and, in later years, by devoted attendance at the Wigmore Hall.
In England he and his mother and his younger sister Marie-lyse stayed in Ware with friends, one of whom, Beryl, Lady Charnwood, was to pay for Sherban’s subsequent education at Winchester. After the Second World War, needing to fend for herself, Princess Sanda set up a chicken farm at East Brabourne in Kent, where an ancient cottage became the home of the family in exile.
At Winchester, Cantacuzino’s housemaster, “Budge” Firth, became something of a surrogate father to him, paying for his final term, in which he gained an exhibition to Magdalene College, Cambridge, to read History, though he quickly changed to Architecture. At the university from 1946 he made friends for life with a gifted generation including the architect Philip Dowson, later President of the Royal Academy, the conductor Raymond Leppard and the playwright Peter Shaffer.
Through Dowson’s wife Sally he met Anne Trafford, whom he married at the Brompton Oratory in 1954; four years later they followed the Dowsons to Pembroke Studios in Kensington, where Cantacuzino made an ingenious conversion of one of the 1890s’ doubleheight studios into a family home – there were by now two daughters and, in due course, a son.
Their other neighbours in this cultured and convivial enclave included the painters David Hockney, Michael Andrews and Leonard Rosoman, the Czech sculptor Franta Belsky and the writer Gitta Sereny.
Cantacuzino had been for a few years in practice as an architect, but soon turned to writing about the subject, in books that showed his allegiance to the Modernist aesthetic
(Modern Houses of the World, 1964) as well as his deep concern with reconstruction and continuity (New
Uses for Old Buildings, 1975) – themes which showed a continuity with his father’s interests and made him a good choice for the master jury of the inaugural Aga Khan Awards for Architecture, given to historically sensitive projects in the Islamic world.
He would also later chair the European steering committee of Icomos, the international NGO dedicated to conservation of historic sites.
In 1978 he published perhaps his best book, a monograph on Wells Coates, the brilliantly innovative architect of the Isokon flats in Hampstead. As executive editor of the Architectural
Review for six years from 1973, Cantacuzino was at the heart of debates on planning and design, and he was a natural choice to become secretary of the Royal Fine Art Commission, a post he held from 1979 to 1995.
This now-defunct body, with no powers but with considerable influence as an arbiter of new architectural proposals, was for much of his time under the chairmanship of Norman St John Stevas, who had been brought in to heighten the Commission’s profile; his flamboyance and self-importance differed as much from the secretary’s manner as did their views on design.
These years saw some high-profile decisions, many focusing on recurring conflicts between modernity and pastiche – most notably the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing, which was the focus of the Prince of Wales’s notorious intervention in 1984.
Cantacuzino, who championed the prize-winning (but rejected) design by Ahrends, Burton and Koralek, disagreed strongly with the Prince, as he did over the subsequent case of Paternoster Square, the sensitive site next to St Paul’s Cathedral, where Arup’s prize-winning proposal was similarly scotched.
None the less, the Commission had countless less conspicuous successes under his secretaryship, many secured by his insistence on visiting sites and talking with architects and planning officers all over Britain. He was appointed CBE in 1988 and his principles were enshrined in What Makes a Good Building? An inquiry by the Royal Fine Art Commission (1994).
Cantacuzino had made an exploratory return visit to Romania in 1971, and found his passion for its landscape and culture reawakened. In the following years he returned several times as a lecturer for Swan Hellenic, and in the decade after the fall of the Ceausescus he began his practice of taking groups of 20 people round historic sites. He also initiated a campaign to restore 60 wooden churches with the help of local people – a typical way of instilling pride in communal heritage projects.
More recently, he was active in the successful international campaign to prevent development of the Rosia Montana gold mine in Transylvania, a project that would have caused enormous environmental damage.
Cantacuzino had leukaemia for 10 years, and bowel cancer was diagnosed in 2016, but he kept up his interests, reading the whole of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall in his last months. He admitted to being depressed, not by the prospect of death but by the imminence of Brexit, which dealt a blow to his sense of Britain, the country which had embraced him as a boy. It was a kindness he repaid a hundred times over.
He leaves his wife Anne, his daughters Ilinca, an artist, and Marina, founder of the Forgiveness Project. His son Sherbani died in 1978.
Sherban Cantacuzino, born September 6 1928, died February 19 2018